Thursday, January 27, 2011

I figured I'd join the other people posting about the same event. I leave in a few hours for FUDCon Tempe 2011. I've lost count of the number of FUDCons I've been to. A lot.

This FUDCon is unique for the installer team in that it's the first time all of us will be in the same geographical location. Some of us have been working together for 3, 4, 5, or more years without ever having met in person. We will be pitching a number of talks as well as a holding a huge feature planning meeting intended to cover the next several Fedora releases.

I look forward to seeing everyone there. Old faces, new faces, and In-N-Out Burger1.

UPDATE: (Originally posted with the wrong tag to show up on planet.fp.o, fixed that. Currently using free wifi at SLC, except it only allows port 80 and port 443 traffic out. Lame. My phone is more capable.)

Saturday, January 15, 2011

No, I have not lived in Atlanta for a long time now (moved away in 1999, then got pulled back in 2001, then moved away again in 2005). But my parents and sister live there, as do a number of friends. This past week, the southeastern portion of the United States experienced unusual winter weather. My sister posted pictures of my parents house here.

Atlanta is known for extremely mild winters with the occassional ice storm. Growing up I remember one snow storm that resulted in snow accumulation that we could walk around in and shovel (it was referred to as the Blizzard of 93). Given the infrequent nature of snow in Atlanta, the region just does not have the equipment or resources to handle things like plowing and salting. So a significant snowfall in Atlanta will result in closings of most schools, businesses, and other non-critical things. My mother is a schoolteacher for GCPS and their system was closed for the entire week. My sister had to work from home numerous days because their office building was closed. And my father spent the night at his office to ensure he would not be blocked by road conditions.

I think the region is more or less back to normal, but it was probably a fun week for all of them. In Hawaii we have been experiencing lots of rain and flash flooding. It's also incredibly humid.

Anyways, Atlanta residents...glad things are back to normal. My recommendations for extreme winter weather (for when it happens in another 5 to 10 years):

Drive with headlights on, but not high beams.

Drive in the tracks of previous cars. That is, if you see pavement, go for it rather than packed snow or ice.

Drive slowly. This is probably the most annoying thing about winter driving, but it's also the most important. Depending on conditions, this can mean half the speed limit or even lower.

Don't tailgate. If you hit a patch of ice, you want enough room between you and other objects.

A couple bags of play sand in your trunk can help vehicle stabilization. But don't open the bags.

It's a nice Saturday afternoon and while I take a break from packing up things in my office, I decided to work through a number of Fedora bugs I've had open for a while. I reassigned some anaconda networking bugs to Radek Vykydal, as he is our new go-to guy for anaconda networking code now. I tested a few other bugs to see if they've been cleaned up with other recent changes and closed those that were.

For packages, I worked on a couple wicd bugs. One that took me a while was #661226, which provided a systemd service file and links to instructions on how to change the package over to systemd. I think I've done this correctly, but as I state in the bug, I've asked the original reporter to test things out.

I upgraded the calendar package to the version that shipped with OpenBSD4.8. No code changes, just corrections to included calendar data files.